Mentoring Graduate Students

Introduction

Good mentoring is crucial to graduate student success both during and after graduate school. Mentoring moves beyond advising because it becomes a more personal relationship that involves socialization into the norms of the profession, role modeling, career guidance, and friendship along with support during research and thesis preparation. This section provides links to guidebooks and online resources with detailed discussions of issues in effective mentoring for both faculty mentor and graduate student. The final two websites offer more general resources on institutional mentoring programs and faculty mentoring at all levels.

General Resources

The Graduate School, Michigan State University
This extensive site contains important resources for both graduate students and faculty advisors/mentors at Michigan State University. Includes downloadable guidelines for mentoring and for integrity in research and creative activities. Also has links to graduate handbooks by department.
http://www.msu.edu/user/gradschl/

Research & Scholarly Integrity (The Graduate School at Michigan State University).
A guide to resources for teaching responsible conduct in research, scholarship, and creative activities.  Links lead to materials on important topics, including guidelines for graduate student advising and mentoring relationships and for integrity in research and creative activities.  Each topic has a PowerPoint presentation and a PDF version with “notes attached” for students.
http://grad.msu.edu/researchintegrity/

"How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty" (University of Michigan, Rackham Graduate School, 2009).
This downloadable handbook for faculty members contains guidelines on the basics of good mentorship, includes specific suggestions for dealing with issues that might arise generally and with sub-groups such as female graduate students or those from a racial or ethnic minority.
http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/Fmentoring.pdf

"How to Get the Mentoring You Want: A Guide for Graduate Students" (University of Michigan, Rackham Graduate School, 2010).
This downloadable handbook for graduate students covers many issues important to the mentoring relationship, including mentoring issues for underrepresented students.
http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/mentoring.pdf

"Advisor, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering" (National Academy Press, 1997).
A comprehensive guide with information useful for faculty in all disciplines. Summarizes features that lead to successful mentoring relationships with undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students and junior faculty. Full text is available to read online or can be purchased as paperback or PDF download.
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=5789

Resources on Faculty Mentoring (University of Michigan, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching).
Although not specifically focused on mentoring graduate students, this is a comprehensive site with general and discipline-specific resources on mentoring. Contains many online links to articles, institutional mentoring programs, and other mentoring materials.
http://www.crlt.umich.edu/faculty/facment

Mentoring (University of Washington, Center for Instructional Development and Research).
This site offers an annotated list of online resources on mentoring, including a link to a faculty guide, a graduate student guide, and "Promising Practices,” which lists numerous and varied mentoring programs across North America.
http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/resources/mentoringtools.html

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Michigan State University Resources

Responsible Conduct of Research
http://grad.msu.edu/rcr/

Human Subjects in Research
http://humanresearch.msu.edu/

Animal Subjects in Research
http://www.ular.msu.edu/

Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities
http://urca.msu.edu/

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